Is Apple Environmentally Friendly?

When it comes to the environment, tech companies don’t have the best reputation. Rightly so, because the production of new devices costs quite a few exhaustive materials and releases a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Fortunately, tech giants like Apple have a green policy and they don’t shy away from using it in their communication to say the least. So, is Apple environmentally friendly - or is it mainly a marketing gimmick? 

This is what Apple claims

The most bold claim Apple makes is that they’re carbon neutral by 2030. Other claims relate to the use of renewable electricity in their manufacturing process, using more recycled materials and investing in nature-based solutions. Furthermore their green policy (found here) states that Apple designs its products to be more energy efficient, so consumers use less energy too.

Let’s take a look at the numbers

To check whether Apple is really environmentally friendly we’ve taken a look at Apple’s environmental progress report from 2021. This is what we found:

Less greenhouse gas emissions

According to the report Apple emits almost a quarter less CO2 than 5 years ago. The biggest differences are made in the manufacturing process with a 15% reduction realized in the last year due to - amongst other things - the emissions-free aluminum smelting process used in the production of the new MacBook Pro 2021.

An increasing use of recycled materials

Although the overall use of recycled materials is nowhere near Apple’s goals yet, we still can detect an upward trend. For instance the iPhone 12 uses 99% recycled tungsten, cases of several iPads are made with 100% recycled aluminum and most main logic boards are made using 100% recycled tin solder.

Less emissions due to product use

Emissions during a product’s life cycle have been reduced by a little over 10% in the last couple of years. This does support the claim of new devices being more energy efficiënt as we’ve also talked about in our iPhone 12 vs iPhone 13 breakdown. Especially considering that Apple has even sold more products than the years before.

Conclusion

So, is Apple environmentally friendly? Pretty much. At least they put in a lot of effort in trying to be by reducing gas emissions over time and using more recycled materials. In addition Apple uses less plastic in their packaging materials and introduced Apple Self Service making it easier to repair your iDevices instead of buying new ones (which is great news since we argued that second hand phones are better sustainable phones).

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